


Hand In Hand

by extra_plus_ordinary



Series: Blupjeans Drabbles [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Blupjeans fluff, I Will Go Down With This Ship, That's right pure fluff who would've guessed, a thousand years, blupjeans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 13:07:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12366447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extra_plus_ordinary/pseuds/extra_plus_ordinary
Summary: It's comforting, it's frightening and it's love.(Or: A short short fluff piece for blupjeans)





	Hand In Hand

**Author's Note:**

> ...again. I told myself 500 WORDS LAYLA  
>  but nah here's 1,844 of them  
> it's pure fluff though that's nice  
> oh play that link you won't regret it

Here's something everyone knows about Barry:  
He's, like, super clumsy.  
  
Here's something no one knows about Barry:  
His fingers are agile as _hell_ .  
  
The crew figures this out a decade into the cycle, when the world they fall into is of sea and islands, and so Davenport chooses Lup and Barry to come with him sail out to retrieve the Light.  
  
At first, Lup is confused, and wonders why Captn'port would want Barry, the resident nerd who keeps glancing at her, on a ship with him out of _all people_ when she sees him tying stuff on deck down before a storm.

He moves with unsettling ease, his hands a blur of graceful motion unlike the rest of his body. The knots he ties are intricate and absurdly small, and it's all she can do to keep her ears from standing straight up in surprise as he turns away from his work nearly catches her staring. The arriving storm is dreadful and a wave comes and knocks Barry overboard, his fingers slipping through hers as he falls into the murky depths below to meet a long and painful end.

 

For the rest of the trip she’s uncharacteristically silent, picking at the knots he made and trying to untie them and figure out how he did them to no avail; in the next cycle she forces him to teach her, his hands draped on top of her own as he guides them into a making a constrictor knot.  
  
She focuses on his hands a lot after that.  
  
She watches him in the lab, using micropipettes with unwavering fingers and typing up data without having to look at the keys like she has to. She watches him, noting that he likes to bite his fingernails when unnerved or stressed but never bites them to the quick; a row of thin, neat crescent moons side by side as he holds a mug, a book, her hand one day when they're both idle and a little tipsy from Lucretia's secret alcohol stash they raided. His touch feels hot and sweaty but she doesn't mind, squeezing his hand as she takes a swig from the wine bottle they've been using, finishing the remnants before Lucretia storms in. They bolt, running through the halls hand in hand and laughing as she chases them.  
  
She watches him in the robot cycle, his fingers moving delicately through machinery, his touch light even as the robot in question keeps shocking him with vicious mirth. His hands fly into the air in frustration as she laughs, and he blows his cheeks out a bit in indignation before chuckling as well. And it's through this laughter they share that she realizes that she's falling and _hard_ and that she wasn't sure he would be there to catch her.  
  
There's a cycle where Taako makes himself scarce, hitting up the nightlife in a cycle that wasn't _quite_ like home but was close enough to it that they weren't always on edge. It's during this cycle that Lup teaches Barry how to braid her hair, mostly out of boredom but also because she wanted an excuse to be close to him, to touch his fingers and be touched by them and he doesn't seem to mind, catching on rather quickly as she shows him the different styles she's partial to.  
  
There's a day where she's sitting cross-legged on his bed as he tries to do two Dutch braids on either side of her head. His fingers are rough and end up grazing the sides of her scalp as he works, so she finds herself nodding off to the gentle pull on her hair and the comfortable weight of his chest sometimes pushing on her back as he stretches to grab more hair.  
  
She feels him finish and waits for him to shake her and tell her to get off his bed but he doesn't. And she feels his fingers again, now grazing the smooth expanse of her long, bunny-like ears and she feels herself tense up at his touch. He stops, and he's pulling away and beginning to mutter an apology before she grabs his hand again and puts it on top of her ears in silent approval. He chokes out a hesitant _are you sure_ before letting himself give in to the temptation. He strokes them slowly, softly with a certain amount of care that makes her want to cry, and she falls asleep to the sensation of being loved.  
  
When he gets too nervous or too sad about something it's the skin around his fingers that get the brunt of the impact; she's walked in numerous times to the tangy smell of blood  dripping from the tiny, numerous wounds on his fingers where skin just barely peeled away to meet flesh as he lies on his bed, sits at his desk or watches the night sky with dread or anger or something much, much sadder.  
  
She walks in and brings with her band-aids, gauze strips or whatever the hell else she was able to find in a quick two minutes. Wordlessly, she comes and she wipes his tears and blood away, wraps his fingers up and entwining them in her own, pulling him closer and tells him _it's_ _alright, you're alright, we're alright._  
  
When she gets too nervous or too sad about something it's his knuckles that brush the side of her face, wiping her tears away in the darkness of her room as she wakes up from a nightmare only to clutch onto his hands and cry, feeling his fingers going through her hair as he tries to calm her down saying _it's alright, you're alright, we're alright._  
  
There's a year that he dies in the first month and she finds herself awake through most of the cycle, hands fidgety and clutching onto something, anything that was his: a pen, a handkerchief, a stupid frog keychain that she pretty much decapitates with a careless tug as she wrings her hands, searching for a pair that aren't there to hold her, to touch her and to tell her _it's alright, you're alright, we're alright._  
  
And then they are, a full eleven months later.      
  
They all come to him, patting his back and filling him in on the details of the year past and she just stares at him in relief and something she can't quite give a name to. She waits for them to break off and leave him, for him to go ambling down to his room to get settled back in before she slips to his side, entwining one of her hands in his own and the other in his hair before kissing him, quickly and sharply. The salty taste of tears reach both of their lips in that one second she allows them to come together before she pulls away, trying bolt out of embarrassment of _did he want that what if he didn't like that-_

And then there's a tug on her hand and she's falling, and hard ,but this time he's there to catch her and they come together again in the darkness.  
  
Their moments together alone were abundant and fleeting, always keeping a distance from each other to keep away prying eyes and sly smiles. But they always try. They find research projects that only require two people, certain dates when everybody is out on errands, definite times of night when no one is awake to hear them talk, laugh or kiss. They always find a way for their hands to touch the same test tube, the same door or the same plate, giving into a burst of connection before pulling away and letting their respective worlds spin again.  
  
She watches him in Legato, fumbling over the keys of a piano. He hits one note, then another, tapping out a skeleton of a tune that she recognizes as a song from their homeworld. She laughs, clapping her hands to the beat and relishing in this one piece of home they could reproduce. He looks up at her and asks if _maybe, if it was easier, could we work together_ and she's a step ahead, already handing him a music sheet, scrawled with notes that were at the back of her mind the very first day she kissed him.  
  
Months later and his fingers now hover over a grand piano in the middle of an auditorium. He's nervous, yes; the offbeat tapping of his foot gives him away, and his hands, usually the most still part of him, were laced with a slight tremor. He looks over and catches her staring and she curls her own fingers together to make a big thumbs up, mouthing _we got this_ as the host formally introduces them to the crowd.  
  
They bow, at first to the crowd and then to each other and Barry begins to [play](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgaTQ5-XfMM).  
  
It's soft, hesitant and stumbling at first. The tune doesn't really flow and there are parts that to some may look like mistakes and a murmur goes through the crowd before Lup takes a breath and jumps in.  
  
The violin is enough to silence them as the first notes ring through the auditorium. At first they match Barry's own notes, a one, two, three before it changes, guiding the piano as she leads the song. It's smoother now, faster and more confident as the song seems to twist and move around itself as they play. The world seems to fall silent as the two map out their existences alone and together in music. It's comforting, it's frightening and it's _love_ as they play, not for the crowd but for each other.  
  
Then Lup stops playing.  
  
For a second Barry continues with vigor, a one, two, three before he notices her absence. He glances at her and then down at the piano again, his left pinky stuttering before hitting a wrong note and the music becomes discordant, held together by a bare skeleton of a tune that still manages to be beautiful and devastating as he fights to keep it together, hands moving at lightning speed.  
  
Then Lup starts playing, and she can feel the panicked tension in the room slip away as they ease back into their duet, soft and calming before rising to a crescendo that can only be defined as _you’re back, you’re back thank God you're back_ before they're falling again, settling back into the twisting notes that merge into one song shared by two.

 

And the music patters out as the last notes are struck and they both breathe, hearts and souls bare to the world as they look out into the cheering crowd, their family in tears as they present their work to the Light before running, hand in hand. Their music is broadcasted again to the world and planes at large, and they relish in it as they collapse onto each other on the side of a hill, laughing and crying and kissing as the notes whisper  
  
_This is our past_

 _  
_ _This is our future_

  
_This is us._  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Send me prompts I'm lonely @extra-plus-ordinary


End file.
